


we built this tomb together (I won't fill it alone)

by doctorkaitlyn



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Animal Death, Blood, Dark, Dubious Consent, F/M, Manipulation, Mild Gore, Post-Episode: s01e08 Bad Blood, Power Imbalance, Prompt Fic, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 21:36:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11860146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorkaitlyn/pseuds/doctorkaitlyn
Summary: With graveyard dirt frosting his hair and blood drenching his front, Simon runs.(or, after Clary brings Simon back, he tries to make a go at things by himself. When his efforts fail in the worst possible way, there's only one person he can turn to.Who better to teach him how to be a monster than the most monstrous of them all?)





	we built this tomb together (I won't fill it alone)

**Author's Note:**

> written for the following prompt for round 3 of the Shadowhunters Prompt Ficathon: _Camille/Simon, he didn't know he needed someone to show him how to be a monster until she did._
> 
> please, for the love of God, heed the tags on this. the alternate title of this was "being a vampire fucking sucks," so that basically sums it up.
> 
> title from [If I Was Your Vampire](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3c4lc3Ea4Y) by Marilyn Manson (yeah, I know, I'm real subtle, but seriously, the entirety of the _Eat Me, Drink Me_ album suits Camille.)

With graveyard dirt frosting his hair and blood drenching his front, Simon runs. 

He leaves the cemetery behind in the blink of an eye, surroundings blurring around him. There’s blood stuck in what feels like every crack of his teeth, every crevice hidden in his gums, and no matter how many times he spits, no matter how many times he runs his tongue around the inside of his mouth, the taste doesn’t go away. 

His throat is burning. Every swallow feels like he’s choking down razor blades. It’s nothing less but pure agony, eons away from the time he got strep throat in tenth grade and could barely breathe from the pain. His stomach is aflame, and his very skin hurts, feels pulled too tightly against his bones, like there’s something crawling underneath it that he needs to rip out. 

He’s dead. Not in an ironic way, not in the way he’d sometimes wished when school was too overwhelming. Actually dead. The should be rotting in a coffin six feet under the earth kind. 

The kind that doesn’t breathe. That has no heartbeat. 

The kind, apparently, that feeds on blood. 

Coming to a stop and glancing around, he realizes that, in what could only have been five minutes at the most, he’s reached a completely different area of town, at least forty blocks away from the cemetery. Spinning around on his heel (and nearly overbalancing in the process) and looking down the blocks towards the East River, he can see the horizon going from dark to light, deep navy blue to the barest hint of orange. 

A few days ago, the bleeding of the sky from night to day would have been something worth watching, especially if he was with Clary. She drew sunrises sometimes; there’s probably half a dozen of them stashed in his room, tucked into the pages of his novels and textbooks. 

Now, he’s pretty sure that if he doesn’t get out of the street before that smudge of orange grows any brighter, he’s not going to have a chance to see Clary draw again. 

(Frankly, he’s not sure if he wants to see her again at all. He may have left her and Jace and Raphael behind in the cemetery, but he can still smell her blood. When he closes his eyes, he can still see the veins of her neck throbbing under her pale skin.

If he ever sees her again, he doesn’t know if they’ll both make it out alive.

Or, well. Standing, at least, in his case.) 

Glancing around, he tries to find a place where he can hunker down before the sun comes up. Three of the four corners of the intersection he’s standing at contain small businesses; a bodega, a barbershop, and a payday loan place that looks already open based on the florescent glow pouring from its plate glass windows. 

But the building on the fourth corner has boarded up windows and a padlock secured to the front door. 

He blurs across the street, nearly knocking into someone who absolutely reeks of alcohol and vomit- 

(and even though the smell is enough to make him gag, a tiny voice in the back of his mind, smooth and sultry, tells him to feed, and his throat _burns_ , and he aches from head to toe and)

-and goes through the narrow alley that separates the dilapidated building from its neighbor. The lower windows are boarded up, but the second floor ones are free of any obstruction. Some of the glass panes are broken, while others are nearly opaque with accumulated dirt. They’re easily fifteen feet off the ground, maybe even higher, but with barely any effort, Simon jumps up and wraps his fingers around the protruding window sill. The remaining glass clinging to the frame shatters when he shoves his fist through it. He hauls himself in and lands on a floor covered in a foot of dust. The splintered remnants of a chair and table are resting in the corner, but aside from that, the room is empty. 

There’s a closet set into one wall, and while the doors look like they’re barely clinging to their hinges, it’ll have to do. 

Probably more spacious than a coffin anyways. 

He climbs inside and pulls the doors closed, and it’s just large enough that, with his back resting against one wall, he can fully stretch his legs out.

Even though the aching feels like it’s spread into his very bones, even though his throat desperately yearns for moisture (or, rather, one specific kind of moisture), he’s asleep before the first real glimmer of sunlight breaks into the room. 

&.

When he wakes up, the agony is all encompassing. 

Every square inch of his body is flooded with blinding pain, and when he bites into his bottom lip to stop himself from screaming, blood floods down his chin. 

After a few moments where the only thought able to break through the pain is that he should just fling himself into the sunlight and be done with it, some relief comes. It’s not much, but it’s enough that his spine relaxes, no longer pulled taut in agony. 

That’s when he hears the scratching. 

It’s thunderously loud in his ears, like it’s mere inches away from his head, but a quick sweep of the closet reveals that it’s just as empty as it was when he climbed in. When the scratching, inter-cut with the swish of something against the floor, continues, he turns and pries the closet door open, just wide enough so that he can look out into the room, which is thankfully free of any direct rays of sunlight. 

There’s a rat mere inches away. It’s huge and gray, rubbing its paws together like it’s trying to polish something between them, tail extending behind it like a limp shoelace. It turns its head to and fro, glancing around the room, beady eyes swiveling in their sockets. 

There’s no conscious thought behind Simon’s decision to burst from the closet and grab the rat. 

He’s just so _thirsty_. 

Afterwards, when the rat’s body is empty, sagging in on its ribs like a deflated balloon, when the thirst has gone from overwhelming to merely annoying, Simon jams his fingers down his throat and throws up. 

The full force of the thirst immediately returns with a vengeance. 

Throwing the rat back out into the room, he closes the closet door and tries to go back to sleep, even though it feels like a fever has invaded his entire body. 

Eventually, he succeeds. 

&.

The next time he awakens, the thin gray light that had previously been filling the room has vanished, and his cell phone is vibrating in his pocket. 

Once he realizes, he yanks it out of his jeans, only to see that the incoming call is from Clary. Even without answering, he has a fairly good idea of how their conversation will go; she’ll beg for him to come back, ask where he is so that she can come find him, say that she’s sorry. 

And after all that, he’ll tell her that he can’t say where he is, because he won’t be able to stop himself from trying to tear her throat out if she shows up. 

It’s a conversation that he thinks he can skip so, before the call finishes ringing out, he curls his fingers into his palm and crushes the phone into splintered fragments of metal and glass. 

He tosses it out of the closet in the direction of the rat’s lifeless corpse and tries to go back to sleep, even though night has fallen and his newfound instincts are screaming at him to wake up. 

Not to mention the fact that he’s thirsty. 

He suspects that he’s going to be thirsty for the rest of his long, long undead life. 

He manages a few more hours of fitful sleep before he bolts upright, ripped out of his slumbering by something. It takes a few moments to identify the something as a sound, and a few more moments to identify what the sound actually is. 

It’s nails coming out of a wall. Boards being pried away from one of the downstairs windows. 

Even in the closet, he can smell the person’s blood drifting up through the floorboards, and his fangs drop from his gums, pricking into his lower lip in anticipation. 

He bolts through the closet and out the window. 

There’s more blood in the outside world, so many different scents interlocking and tangling together that he wants to scream, but if he runs fast enough, he can just barely manage to ignore them. 

So he runs as fast as he can, keeps moving until the thick, polluted smell of water swoops up on him, and he stops mere feet short of plunging into the East River. 

There are warehouses marching along the river in either direction, as far as the eye can see. He’s been here before, and he knows that while most of them are bustling at all hours of the day, there are a few that are shut-down, formerly owned by companies that went bankrupt or simply decided to end their operations. 

He finds one just down the street, slinking through the dark alleyways between the huge buildings, trying to stay as far away from the people on the nearby sidewalks as possible. While the other warehouses that he passes are lit up, echo with noise and activity, this one is completely dark and utterly silent. He pops around front just long enough to see that the staggeringly large doors are held closed with padlocks the size of his fist. 

Even though he’s feeling lightheaded, woozy like he hasn’t eaten in days-

(that same smooth voice from earlier whispers _because you haven’t_ in the very back of his mind)

-he’s pretty sure that he could rip the padlock apart without barely twitching a finger. 

But the warehouse also has windows, marching along the side above the pitch-black alley that he came through. 

These ones are higher up, but after he takes a run at it, his fingers manage to latch around the tiny windowsill. He shatters the glass and hauls himself up and through, landing on the concrete floor below hard enough to make his legs buckle. 

Upon his arrival, the room fills with the sound of small animals skittering away into the darkness, claws scraping across the floor. 

More rats. 

He’s able to hold off for five minutes. 

This time, he doesn’t bring the blood back up. 

&.

He loses track of how many days he spends in the warehouse. 

During the day, when huge shafts of light come through the windows and dot the floor like landmines, he sleeps underneath an overturned rowboat left behind with other detritus, wrapped up in a tarp that smells like salt and dust. 

At night, he slowly whittles away the warehouse’s extensive rat population and waits for Clary or Raphael to find him. 

But they never show up. 

As the days go by, days where he spends his time wondering about his mother and sister, wondering if his mother has started drinking again, the voice in the back of his head grows louder and clearer. 

It grows more identifiable as Camille. 

_Rats won’t feed you forever. Sooner or later, you’ll need real blood._

“You’re wrong,” he says at one point, his voice seeming shockingly loud in the quiet warehouse. “I’ll be fine.” 

For some time, he actually believes himself. The more rat blood that he drinks, the more his hunger recedes. It never entirely goes away, but the pain that comes with it dissipates to no more than a particularly aggravating itch. 

He thinks that, soon, he’ll be able to venture back out into the world. Be around humans again without wanting to rip them open and bleed them dry. Might even be able to talk to his mom and tell her that he’s okay.

But then the rats run out. They simply stop showing up, and the warehouse echoes with the sound of his own footsteps pacing back and forth across the vast expanse of the room as he tries to think, come up with some kind of plan, where he can go next that will provide him with a food supply and keep him mostly away from people. 

But, all too soon, the thirst returns with a vicious vengeance. 

He loses track of time again. By the night he hears a key turning into the small door set into the side of the warehouse, in the hour before dawn, he barely knows his own name. 

He just knows the _ache_ in the very marrow of his bones. 

The person who steps inside has a huge ring of keys clipped to their belt and heavy boots that thud against the floor. They smell faintly of sweat and vodka, and they’re muttering under their breath, something about needing a new job. 

When Simon sinks his fangs into the patch of skin above their collar, blood spurts from their artery like a firehouse, soaks his face and filthy clothes. He manages to latch on and redirect the spurts down his throat. 

The rats tasted like garbage compared to this. 

He drinks until the flow trickles to a stop. The body, limp and lifeless and heavy in his arms, goes sliding to the floor and he follows after, dropping onto his back and licking at the stray drips of blood underneath his bottom lip. 

For the first time since he stepped out of his grave, the hunger is gone. 

He savors the sheer relief for only a few seconds before the severity, the _weight_ of what he’s done, lands on him like a block of concrete. 

He just killed someone. _Murdered_ them and dumped them like they were nothing more than trash. Became the kind of creature that Shadowhunters, people like Clary, would put down. 

“What have I done?” he whispers to the vast, black expanse of the roof overhead. 

Trying to make it through this on his own no longer seems like an option, but there’s nowhere that he can turn. He can't ask Clary, and he’s pretty sure that Raphael would just chain him up. Maybe hand him straight over to the Clave.

But there is someone else. 

“Not Camille,” he says automatically, but the more he thinks about it, the more the idea comes to seem... 

Well. Not entirely horrible. 

She’s the only other vampire, the only other Downworlder, full stop, that he really knows. She’s the only person who might be able to help him rein himself back in. 

If she can’t, or if she refuses to, there’s another option that he’s willing to pursue, if it comes down to it. 

She already killed him once. 

Maybe she’ll do it again, if he asks. 

Trying to figure out where to find Camille will have to be a task for the next night; he can already see the glow of the sun playing at the windows above. So, sated and covered in still drying blood, he closes the door and retreats to the overturned rowboat. Wrapping himself up in the tarp, brittle rat bones crunching underneath him, he falls asleep within moments. 

&.

When he next opens his eyes, he’s lounging in a huge porcelain bathtub filled with steaming hot water. 

Sitting up quickly enough to make water slosh over the edge of the tub, he whips his head back and forth, taking in the room around him. It’s spacious, sparingly decorated with carefully carved furniture that all looks antique, decorated in rich jewel tones with golden accents. The walls are lined with bookshelves filled to the brim with leather-bound tomes, some with cracked spines. 

The decor doesn't quite match the Hotel Dumort, but it's similar enough to give him deja vu. 

Something rushes by his head fast enough to ruffle his damp hair, and when he turns, Camille is kneeling beside the bathtub, twirling one of her long fingernails along the surface of the pink-toned water. Her hair is loose and flowing over her shoulders in dark waves, and she’s wearing a ruby-red, silk robe belted at the waist. 

“There’s still blood on your chin,” she says, flicking water at him in an arc. 

When Simon pulls one hand from the water to rub at his face, he becomes suddenly aware that he is very naked, and the water doesn’t exactly hide anything. 

His fangs drop and puncture his lip again, and he slams a hand over his mouth. 

Camille just smirks, all white teeth and maroon painted lips. 

“I have to give it to the Fairchild girl,” she says, crossing her arms on the edge of the bathtub and resting her chin on top of them. “She’s certainly dedicated to you.” 

“I don’t want to talk about Clary right now,” Simon snaps, only lowering his hand once he’s sure that his fangs have retracted for the time being. “You’re the one who killed me.” 

“I did,” Camille says with a slight nod. “But she’s the one who turned you. And that’s what you’re truly angry about, isn’t it? She couldn’t bear the thought of losing you, so she turned you into a monster.”

There’s no point in denying it, so Simon nods and sinks further down into the water. 

“I never asked for this,” he says. “And I don’t know what to do. I thought the rats would be enough, that I could live off them, and everything would be fine. All the movies have vampires that live off animals, and they manage not to...”

He can’t bring himself to say _kill someone_. He simply can’t force the words past his mouth. Camille clucks her tongue and reaches out, dragging one fingernail down his cheek. 

“You aren’t the first fledgling to make that mistake. Not even the finest, rarest kind of animal blood compares to that which comes from a human.” She stops with her finger pressed underneath his chin and, for what feels like an eternity, she doesn’t speak. She studies him, stares at him with her impossibly dark eyes, and he wonders if this is what it feels like to be dissected, spread out and studied under a microscope. 

It’s... not entirely unpleasant. 

That is not a thought he wants to have in the forefront of his mind. 

“Did they taste good?” she finally asks. “The person that you killed?” 

Simon so badly wants to say that they didn’t. He wants to say that the person tasted just as bad as the rats had, that blood was blood, no matter where it came from. He wants to say that he wishes that he could take it back. 

Of all the things he wants to say, it's only the last that's true. 

“The Clave is going to look for me, aren’t they?” he says instead. “For killing a mundane.” 

“They would hunt you down in a heartbeat,” she confirms, dropping her finger from his chin. “ _If_ they knew that you’d killed one.” 

_That_ gets Simon’s attention. 

“What do you mean?” he asks, sitting up straight. Camille just grins, teeth as sharp as a tiger. The ends of her hair are floating in the bathwater. 

“I cleaned it up for you,” she says. “That body is probably in the middle of the ocean now. They’ll never find it.” 

“Why?” Simon asks, feeling as if he’s missing something very big, something glaringly obvious. “How did you even know where to find me? Did Raphael tell you?” 

She laughs, the sound biting and cruel. “I haven’t seen Raphael since the night I drained you. If he knew that I was still in the city, he’d hunt me down like a dog, the damned usurper. But word spreads through the Shadow World, darling. I heard about your beloved friend bringing you back to life, about you somehow managing to evade Raphael and the rest of his followers. Impressive work, my little caramel.” 

“Don’t call me that,” he says automatically, but it only makes her laugh again. 

“It was easy enough to find you,” she continues. “I can feel all of my fledglings, darling. Including you.” She runs her fingers through his damp hair, nails dragging along his scalp in a way that rides the line between pain and pleasure. “I can feel when they need help. And you do need help, don’t you?” 

“Yes,” he replies, closing his eyes. It’s a mistake; as soon as his eyelids slip closed, he sees the body back in the warehouse, lying sprawled on the ground like a rug discarded on the curb, throat savaged, concrete floor slick with blood that had evaded his mouth. Snapping his eyes back open, he continues, “I need... I need help. I can’t control this by myself.”

“You need _my_ help,” Camille says, sounding almost _pleased_ with herself. 

“Yes,” Simon says again, sighing and dragging a hand down his face. “Your help.” Camille abruptly leaps to her feet in a blur; the next time she comes into focus, she’s across the room, standing in front of one of the bookcases. 

“There are plenty of mundanes out there who will let us drink from them,” she says, pressing one finger against the spine of a huge book. “We don’t even have to _encanto_ them.” With a soft click, two of the shelves swing away from the wall, revealing what looks like the kind of miniature, glass-fronted fridge found in a science classroom. On the top shelf, there’s a pitcher filled halfway with blood, along with two wineglasses. 

As the smell of it floats across the room and reaches Simon’s nose, the thirst comes back, makes his throat go dry and his head pound.

“I can show you how to drink from them without killing them,” she continues, emptying the pitcher into the two glasses before swinging the shelf back into the wall and crossing the room, walking slowly this time. “I can help you control it. And if you slip up again-” 

“I won’t,” Simon interrupts, forcing the words through his sandpaper dry throat, over a tongue that feels taut and swollen. 

What he really means to say is that he _can’t_ slip up again. Not if he ever wants to see his family again. 

“Then I’ll show you how to make sure you don’t get caught,” she continues, showing no sign that she heard him. “It’s very easy to make things disappear in this city.” She carefully places the wineglasses on a small, gilded table, just out of reach, and Simon has to dig his fingernails into his thighs to keep himself from scrambling over the edge to grab the glass. 

Instead, because there has to be a catch, there has to be a reason Camille is doing this-

(because it certainly can’t be out of the goodness of her unbeating heart)

-he asks, “What are you going to get out of it?” 

Camille shrugs and tugs at the bow holding her robe together. It slithers off her shoulders to the floor, and she stoops to pick the glasses up from the table, firm muscles shifting under her pale skin. 

Simon’s fangs drop again. 

“You would owe me,” Camille answers, carefully stepping over the edge of the bathtub and sinking down into the water. Her legs brush against Simon’s as she settles in, and when she finds a comfortable spot, it’s with her toes brushing against his knees. “I’m sure I’ll find a use for you at some point. Now, drink up,” she says, passing him the wineglass. “You need your strength.” 

He snatches the glass from her fingers and swallows the contents back in a single gulp. Blessed relief washes through his entire body as the blood flows down his throat. It’s even better, stronger, than what had come from the person in the warehouse; crisper, cleaner somehow, although maybe part of that is just from the cold. 

When he lowers his glass, Camille is smirking at him again. Her eyes are gleaming in a way that, on anyone else, might look mischievous. 

On her, it just looks predatory. 

“Oh, darling,” she murmurs, caressing the side of his knee with her toes and taking a small, dignified sip from her own glass, “this might actually be _fun_.” 

Simon is sure that they have very different definitions of the word _fun_. 

But, if there’s anything the movies have taught him, it’s that there’s no way to get out of a deal with the devil once you’ve signed on the dotted line. 

So, he asks, “Can I have some more?”

Camille’s smirk turns into a grin. 

“Sweetheart,” she says, moving onto her knees and sliding forward until she’s between his legs, “you can have as much as you like.” She reaches out to cradle his jaw with one of her hands, thumbs at his bottom lip until he opens his mouth. She places the rim of her own glass against his lips and tilts it, slowly. “So long as you do what I tell you to.” 

The blood is so close, brushing against his lips like the tide at the beach. 

There’s no hesitation. 

Simon drinks and seals his fate. 

Whatever it may be.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, I can be found on [tumblr.](http://banshee-cheekbones.tumblr.com/) :)


End file.
